The Supreme Court directed Facebook, Google, WhatsAap, Microsoft and Yahoo on Monday to come up with the number of complaints they received in the last two years for allowing obscene material like child pornography and rape videos to be circulated through their platforms and action taken by them.
A bench of justices Madan B Lokur and U U Lalit also directed the Centre to give details of cases registered by government authorities against people under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act for circulating videos of child pornography or making obscene representation of a child or children. It granted 10 days to the Centre and the social networking sites to file the report. The court passed the order in a case in which it had taken suo motu cognisance on the basis of a letter written to the Chief Justice of India by Hyderabad-based NGO Prajwala, bringing to notice the rape videos widely circulated on WhatsAap.
It had directed the CBI to probe the cases and catch hold of culprits committing rapes and sharing the video through the social networking sites. As the Centre and internet giants had expressed inability to evolve mechanism to stop uploading of such offending videos, the apex court had earlier directed top technocrats of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft to come to India and participate in a brainstorming meeting for 15 days to find out a solution to deal with the problem. A confidential report has been filed in the apex court after deliberations took place among government officers and representatives of companies. The bench is now examining whether the report should be made public which has been opposed by companies. It directed the lawyers, representing the five social networking sites, to take instructions from the companies on making the report public.
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